A familiar businessman eyes San Diego's baseball team. Will his profit-driven past repeat, or will this franchise bring a beloved football team home?
The first thing you need to know about Tom Gores is that he loves buying businesses. It's literally how he made his fortune of over $10 billion. He would buy distressed assets (companies that were in danger of folding due to substantial losses), reorganize them in a more efficient way (this usually means lay offs), and then sell them for a profit.
As a San Diegan who watched the Chargers leave for Los Angeles, I feel particularly confused by the news surrounding Tom Gores over the last few years.
The thing that Gores is most famous for is owning the Detroit Pistons. He owns it all by himself, all 100% of the team. The thing that Gores is most famous for in San Diego is owning the local paper of record, the San Diego Union-Tribune. He doesn't own it anymore, but his two-year run as the newspaper's owner involved large-scale layoffs before Gores sold for a profit of $80 million.
I've talked to people that follow the Pistons that tell me that the team's recent success can be directly tied to Gores recently taking a step back and ceding control of basketball operations to basketball people. So, perhaps he has learned how to balance his obvious love of owning sports franchises with his desire to run them like a distressed asset.
A year and a half ago, when the opportunity arose for the Beverly Hills resident, Tom Gores purchased 27% of the Los Angeles Chargers for around $750 million. Nobody assumed he had any plans with it besides as an investment.
However, a report from The Athletic a few weeks ago outed Gores as one of several bidders for majority ownership of the San Diego Padres. Considering his history with the San Diego Union-Tribune and his partial ownership of the NFL team that left San Diego, I find this to be a fascinating development.
Should Gores win that bidding war, that would give him at least partial ownership of five professional sports franchises (trailing just behind Stan Kroenke's six). It would also give him a potential avenue to move the Chargers back to San Diego, if he were to become the majority owner of the Chargers and if that were a thing that he was interested in doing.
At the very least, it'll raise the topic and the questions as long as the Chargers continue to rent a stadium from the Los Angeles Rams instead of having a stadium (and a community) of their own.
That would, of course, rely on a sale from Dean Spanos to Tom Gores. I don't think the idea is crazy. Dean Spanos is 75 years old and has officially been running the Chargers for 20 years, unofficially he was running it long before his father (Alex) passed away. He has become a pariah in San Diego after moving the team and ownership disputes has caused public fighting between him and his siblings. It's entirely possible that he doesn't want to keep running the Chargers until the day he dies.
Gores would, in theory, have enough money to buy whatever the Spanos family wanted to sell. Whether that would be their entire 61% or just 24% (which would get Gores to 51%).
I imagine the question of if they would want to will be asked by someone if Gores ends up owning the MLB team that the Chargers used to share San Diego with.